﻿The Ponchoed Piper Picks a Pupil﻿

Listen with care, now. I have a tale to tell, but I swear by the gods, I’ll only sing my song once: My name is Eugene. I am advanced enough in age to boast a full beard but young enough that it is still red throughout. And, technically, I am a kidnapping victim. I recall very little from Life Before. It was a brief period, only thirteen years, and it ended on a late summer day in 1984, when a mysterious man appeared in the tiny, rustic community known as Arcadia, Tennessee. What I do remember isn’t happy. During the previous spring, my father had begun spending his nights on the living room couch, and my mother had taken to padlocking my sister’s bedroom door before she went to sleep. She no longer allowed my father and my sister to spend time alone together. My sister was eight and had recently stopped speaking, for reasons no one ever explained to me. I spent most of my time alone, listening to a Canadian music group that was twelve years out of date. Syrinx was its name. And then there were the rats. Rats everywhere, throughout Arcadia. In our cabinets, in our bathtubs. In our desks, in our streets. In the engines of our cars, all torn and wet and red. They’d been appearing for months, their count increasing exponentially so that they outnumbered first the people, then the livestock, and finally the roaches. It had grown so bad that the citizens of Arcadia could no longer own cats. The rats had learned to attack in droves. They’d hunted down every last feline, cornered them, and swarmed. Each time, they left only a pile of bones and fur behind as they carried off two round eyes. It was the rats that brought the stranger to Arcadia. At least, that’s what the townsfolk thought. The mystery man arrived on foot, wearing a long poncho fashioned from patches of many different brightly colored cloths. He had a thick beard, a snub nose, and a strange red felt hat with a feather stuck in the brim. Still, nobody minded his odd appearance, because he said he was a ratcatcher. Everyone believed him. Everyone needed to. All the grown-ups met and deliberated and agreed to pay him a certain sum if he could rid our land of rodents. I know this because they let me sit in the back and watch, though I wasn’t allowed to make a sound. What occurred next will sound like the stuff of legend or myth, but it happened, as surely as there is air in my lungs and a voice in my throat. Once the adults agreed to the ratcatcher’s price, he shoved his hand deep into a pocket in his poncho and pulled out the last thing any of us would have expected. It was a little pan pipe, made of five hollow reeds that tapered in length. Thin leather straps bound the individual components into a whole, one that the ratcatcher lifted to his mouth and began to blow into. His breath entered one end of the pipe, and music exited the other. Music unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Suddenly, the rodents that ambled around and over our feet stopped, turned, and stared at the ratcatcher, as if transfixed. He took a step backwards, and they mimicked him. He started down the road out of town, and they followed him. Rats poured out of houses and stores as he walked by, ever more of them joining the parade, taking part in the great exodus. The mysterious stranger kept walking until he and every rat in town disappeared from sight. Only the bravest men in town pursued them to see where he would go. My father was not among them. Later, the men returned and said the ratcatcher had gone straight to North Fork Holston River, across the Tennessee-Virginia state line. They claimed he’d played his pipe all the way there, until he reached the edge of the water. Then he raised the bottom of his colorful poncho to his knees and walked into the river, up to his waist. The rats rushed in after him, and hundreds – maybe thousands – of rodents drowned, their bodies floating up to the surface like carbonation bubbles in a glass of soda. But that wasn’t the strangest thing the men told us when they got back to town that evening. They also swore that there had been something strange, something unnatural, about the ratcatcher’s legs. The skin he’d revealed when he raised up his patchwork poncho had been covered in thick brown hair, course as animal pelt, and on his feet, he wore black wooden clogs that clicked against the stones lining the riverbank. “Mark of the devil,” the men all snarled. They shivered, despite the warm summer air. “The deceiver, the destroyer, the fiend of all fiends, the father of all lies! We can’t give our coin to the prince of darkness,” the rest of the townspeople cried in return. There was ﻿panic﻿. There was uproar and chaos. I was supposed to be home, caring for my mute younger sister, but instead I watched the exchange and commotion from the branches of our area’s oldest (and thus tallest) tree. Everyone below seemed to say much but hear little, so that their exclamations became a repetitive jumble of similar but dissonant sounds, like the buzz created by a cloud of charging bees. “We won’t pay,” the adults vowed, after the initial disorder lessened. “We won’t hand over the money.” “Is that so?” the ratcatcher bellowed, emerging from the back of the crowd with the mismatched fabric of his poncho swirling around his legs. His voice was a boom that left the rest of Arcadia silent. His strange red hat hid his ears, but it couldn’t hide the dreadful look on his face. I was still hidden by a thick wall of leaves, but I was certain the mysterious man saw me as he stepped forward. “You promised to pay a certain sum, if I rid your town of rats!” he said. His words sounded like a chant or a curse, filling our ears with their noise. I almost fell from the branch on which I perched. “I have done my part. I have taken your plague away and arranged it so you’ll never have to see the rodents again. Yet, now you will not compensate me?” One man, no doubt envisioning himself as Arcadia’s hero, came to the fore of the throng. “We made an evil deal in ignorance, but we will not honor it in cognizance. Be gone from our land, and take only our burdens, our encumbrances, and our nuisances with you!” Finally, the stranger smiled, a crooked little grin that revealed yellowed teeth. He glanced up at the twigs and leaves that concealed me and then back at the angry mob of beady-eyed adults before him. “Gladly!” he roared. This time the noise did knock me from my tree, and everyone stared as I hit the ground below with a thud. My mother and a few other adults lurched forward to surround me and help me to my feet. By the time anyone looked back at the mysterious ratcatcher, he was gone. No more than a few seconds had passed. The townspeople all sighed with relief and began to disperse, disappearing into their houses and businesses to try to forget what they had seen and heard. My mother made my father carry me home, though he complained that his back ached from too many nights on the couch. She glared at him. He grumbled and lifted me. I tried not to take it personally, but I did.

Illustration for Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Arthur Rackham

When the sun went down, my parents sent my sister and me to bed early. I didn’t mind. I was almost as exhausted as everyone else was glad the ordeal was over. I changed into a pair of ﻿white pajamas﻿ that had been sitting in their plastic packaging in the back of my closet for months. Then I turned on my cassette player and climbed under the covers. Sleep claimed me at once. For several hours, I dreamt of rats. Slumber had been the one place I was safe from rats for more months than I cared to count, but now that they were finally gone, they invaded my unprotected mind. There, flocks of them wandered through grassy valleys and over tree-pocked ridges. Each was driven endlessly forward by some unseen force, but none of them could remember what it was or what life had been like before it came.

Then, in the early hours of the morning, the sound of pipe music woke me. I rose from my bed without thought, without conscious decision. Drawn to the noise by something deep inside my chest, something both ferociously primal and unbearably beautiful, like the music itself, I walked across my room and down the hall. I could hear my sister clawing at her own bedroom door, trying to escape, trying to join me and the sound, but I did not stop. My mother wore the key to the padlock on a silver chain around her neck, and there was no time to bother with that. I made my way through the rest of the house and out onto the street. That’s when I discovered I was not alone.

Children from every home in Arcadia marched through the street, silent, enraptured. I spotted my friends, my classmates. My neighbor, Daphne, on whom I had once had a crush. Only a year earlier, before the rats had started to appear, before my family had broken so suddenly, she and I used to sit on opposite sides of the chain link fence that separated our backyards and face each other. She’d twist her thick brown braid around her fingers, and we’d talk about homework and our parents and the last episodes of M*A*S*H until it grew dark. Now she and every other kid I knew were following the ratcatcher, who played an impossible tune on his pipe as he led them down the road, his bright poncho fluttering in the night breeze. Each of the children behind him wore white. I gladly joined their number.

Illustration for Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Kate Greenaway

We were one hundred and thirty by the time we crossed out of Arcadia. I didn’t count, but the piper did, and he told me much later. After two minutes of following him, I no longer thought much of anything. The music – his music, that wondrous song – filled my mind and pushed out all else. It rid me of my worries about my speechless sister, my guilt over the suspicions I had about my father, my sorrow over the lines that had recently etched themselves into my mother’s once-perfect face. I was light, and I was free, and I was where I belonged, and so on I walked.

I danced along behind my piper for days on end. He led us first toward the river where he’d drowned the rats, and then around it, to the mountain on the other side. He climbed, and we climbed. He charged ahead, and we pursued. He played, and we listened. We seemed to walk in every direction and no direction, though we encountered only grass and trees and animals, never another person. We didn’t ever seem to tire or thirst or hunger – not that we could feel, at least. At some point, though, the smallest and weakest of our rank did begin to collapse. They made no sound, gave no sign beforehand. They simply collapsed and dissolved as they fell through the air, leaving only piles of blinking rats where their corpses should have been. An average eleven year old created about one hundred and ten mangy brown-gray rodents. A four year old made only fifty.

I saw this, but felt no shock or sadness. It was just the cost of our journey, and in a strange way, it was expected. The music swirling within my head told me I had known what was to come from the instant the piper had awoken me with his first note, that I had accepted it when I rose from my bed and took my first step toward the source of the sound. Each time another child disappeared, my master turned, still blowing into his pipes, and gave a little nod. Then the rats would scamper off in a single direction, their destination seemingly already determined. By the time we reached our new home, only twelve of us remained: myself, Daphne, Xander, Phoebe, Phil, Kelley, Omar, Genny, Kory, Jason, Claus, and Fred. Besides my sister, we were all that was left of the children of Arcadia.

Broken ride at an abandoned amusement park. Site and photographer disputed.

The place the piper had led us lay at the bottom of a valley surrounded by woods. It was a compound of sorts, built from the rusted, peeling ruins of a long-abandoned amusement park and encircled by a tall iron fence. Other children watched from the entrance of what had once been a fun house as the piper led the twelve us through the gate. Only after it was closed and locked behind us did he stop playing, and only then did thought return to us. We blinked, looked around, and took in our strange surroundings. Headless carousel ponies littered the ground to our left. Disjointed roller coaster tracks rose over building tops in the distance, though they were hard to make out through the fog that filled the park. In the center of it all stood a castle in miniature, complete with towers and battlements. I sensed immediately that the piper himself resided there.

The girls in our flock began to cry, and several of the boys rose up their fists, as if to fight the man who had brought us home.

“Where have you led us?” Daphne sobbed.

“What did you do to us?” Xander hollered. “And how?”

The piper only raised his eyebrows and smiled.

“Music,” I said. It was almost a whisper, but everyone heard and turned their eyes on me. “It influences you more than you know. Music controls people, and he controls music.”

The piper’s smile broadened into a grin then. “That’s exactly right, my boy,” he boomed. His round cheeks and snub nose scrunched as he peered into my face. “Finally, another who appreciates the power of Pan. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for you, son.”

And just like that, I became the piper’s apprentice, his heir. That night, after he led the other children into the fun-house-turned-dormitory, he brought me back to his castle and made me up a room adjacent to his. He taught me how to play a pan pipe over the next few months. I used a practice set, for he made me promise never to touch his, so long as he had breath to blow into it. I swore on my life and on my pipes.

A castle in miniature at the incomplete and abandoned Wonderland Amusement Park in Bejing, China. Attributed to David Gray.

From the beginning, the other children knew I was different, that I was not one of them. I never joined in their labors or their games. Instead, I often watched them from a tower window. I observed the girls weeding the garden behind the fun house on their hands and knees, looked out on the park below as the boys chased each other through the fog. When the boys were in particularly high spirits, they’d slip into the girls’ garden and dig a potato from the earth with quick, grimy fingers. Then they’d sneak it over to the rusty old high striker and smash it with the mallet. I did not envy their laughter or their sports, though.

Roman copy of a 2nd century Greek statue of Pan teaching Daphnis how to play the pipes. Found in Pompeii.

From my position so high up, my former companions resembled my master’s rats, and I preferred it that way. I found it oddly nauseating to descend from my tower and watch them grow back into people approximately my size. The sensation felt somewhat like vertigo. For that reason, at least in part, I usually rejected the piper’s offers to let me go play with the other children, and I never accompanied him when he visited the older girls at night. Nonetheless, whenever one of those girl-women swelled with child and gave birth, I was charged with smuggling the squalling infant away and leaving it in the woods near the edge of some town. But I never had to speak to one of the reluctant mothers, thank the gods. None of them ever lived long enough to hear her baby’s first cry or see me arrive.

I soon learned that my master was neither the first piper, nor the last, but one in a long line that traced back to mythic Greece, to the son of Hermes. Later on, once I had become skilled with my instrument, I began accompanying the piper when he visited towns. Each seemed to be another Arcadia; each saw the same story play out. It didn’t take me long to realize that my master was sending the rats into the communities himself. I already knew where they came from. I just tried not to think about it. Still, I flinched each time one of the other children, one of the unchosen, tried to escape or disobeyed an order and was rewarded with a blow that reduced them to a pile of rats. I grieved silently whenever it was one of the Arcadians, and I shed tears when it was Daphne. But I never said a word about it to my master.

"Pan (Le Faune)" by Carlos Schwabe

And so the years passed and blurred. I lost track of my age, of the number of children I’d helped welcome into the park. None of them survived to adulthood, as I did. I grew taller and hairier and louder and ever-better with my melodies, and the piper, sadly, grew older. Eventually, he stopped visiting the older girls in the fun house at night. Nine days ago, he stopped visiting towns. Two hours ago, I sat by the foot of his bed as he played his last tune. Then he fell silent forevermore. He’d been holding out his pipe to me, his magic pipe, Pan’s pipe, when he went, and it fell to the ground with a clatter. He’d always promised that pipe was my destiny, and I knew it to be true, since a piper never breaks a promise.

I reached for the instrument, fingers trembling. Suddenly, though, in the absence of my master’s music, I could hear another voice in my head. A voice that had been drowned out since I was thirteen. A voice that told me to run, to return to Arcadia, my sister, my home. A voice that was horrified by the things that I’d seen, the things I’d let the piper do, the things I myself had done. A voice that told me I had a choice – I could leave the pipe, end the cycle, go back to my old life – but that I had to make it now. I should listen to that voice, I know. By its ring, I can tell that it is right.

But the pipe. The pipe. My destiny. It’s just lying there, waiting for my breath.